Shiv Visvanathan to L.K. Advani: "What is the genocidal quotient of your speeches?"

Visvanathan has a lot more to say. Here:

let me address the central issue of Gujarat and the violence of 2002. Let us begin with a simple fact that violence began from your constituency. The dead bodies from the Godhra carnage were paraded here, triggering not a ritual of mourning but an orgy of the most obscene violence our country has witnessed in recent times. Yet you spoke as if a balance of murder is the only sense of justice you have. When you can mourn for Kashmir and what happened to the Pandits there, what prevents you from acknowledging a moral responsibility for what happened in your constituency or are you saying that ethnic cleansing is a permitted and legitimate form of political hygiene? Today, the evidence before the Nanavati Commission and the investigations of the SIT team show that your party has been deeply involved in rioting, violence and genocide. Your attitude seems to suggest that majoritarianism exhausts the democratic imagination, that violence is an acceptable tactic for enforcing majoritarianism. Your close colleague and our current CM seems to suggest that it is part of the logic of development.

Violence negates politics and a party that banalises violence eventually exhausts its own political imagination. One wonders whether the current emptiness of your party is a result of this indifference to the atrocities that so many citizens suffered?...